Marginalia
Correction: I noticed that I have been calling Fox News pundit-commentator-news-analyst-whatever-he-is Bill O'Reilly Bob O'Reilly. My only excuse is that I have always had a congenital difficulty with names. Back in my high school days I sat at lunch with a group of other students for my entire senior year and never learned half their names. Meeting any of them on the street months after graduation produced the following conversation: "Andrea, hi!" "Oh, uh, er, hi! How are you doing?"
Speaking of my past... I "came of age," as they say, in the seventies, and for some reason I have been remembering those films they used to show us back then, in order to teach us about how Bad Drugs Were (so bad the side of my high school by the student parking lot reeked of pot), or other lessons - or maybe just to weird us out and make us so depressed we'd stay indoors and do our homework instead of going out and partying. One I particularly remember was an anti-Vietnam short (yes, the Lefties had control of public schools by that time, toward the fag end of the Vietnam war and after) with Michael Douglas as a draft dodger whose dad finagles him into serving his duty; there was that final, oh-so-ironic scene of the dad, bragging about how he'd tricked his kid into getting drafted, turning away from the tv just as the news was showing footage of dead soldiers being carried away - and one of them was the Michael Douglas character! I have no idea why we were shown this film - and it turned up on "After School Specials" and for all I know Creature Feature - I seemed to see it everywhere. I guess to din it into our head that War Was Bad and also that Cute Young Guys had no chance while Old, Crafty White Guys ran the world.
Another film I saw at least once every high school year was - I think - an anti-drug and anti-neglected-teen (by rich, workaholic or otherwise uninvolved parents) film. A teen guy from an upper-middle-class family (we can tell because the homes he and his friends are neglected in are located in a suburb very like the one in the recent film American Beauty) is shown wandering through his useless, aimless existence. The only scene I really remember is a flashback wherein the guy and his friends start fooling around with a pair of antique swords that had been hung on the wall of one of their homes, and one of the friends was accidentally killed in a mock swordfight. The moral of this film? "Don't do drugs and play with swords at the same time."
The next film I can't excise from my cranium is that godawful French piece of existential torture: "The Red Balloon." A schoolkid in Paris forms an unnatural attachment to a red balloon. When it deflates he is heartbroken. Paris was revealed in this film to be not the City of Lights but the City of Crapugly Brown Brick Buildings As Far As The Eye Can See. I still have nightmares about all those red balloons, falling down out of the gray Parisian sky. The moral? "French people are psychotic."
Another film in this oeuvre was one about a depressed kid who was neglected by an abusive stepfather (better neglect than attention from such, I'd say), was too shy in class (due to his abusive and uncaring homelife) to make good grades, had no friends, and in the end swam out into a lake and drowned. The moral of this seemed to be: "That quiet kid in the corner? He might be abused, neglected, suicidal! Don't ignore him - talk to him! Bother the hell out of him! Don't leave him alone with his thoughts for a minute! Lest he take the Long Swim of Doom."
I grew to dread "film day" whenever they occurred. I felt as if I were in the grip of a Jean-Paul Sartre cult of Existential Depressives. But it was the whole Seventies thing. A nation in the grip of the Five Earth Tones (Avocado, "Gold" aka ugly mustard-yellow, Tomato Red, dog-poop brown, and rotten orange) had lost all concept of what "teaching" meant. They had no idea, especially, what to do with high school kids, many of whom not only were driving and drinking and doing drugs already, but were already jaded from hippie-chic me-decade propaganda. Sex was now being promoted as if it were necessary to health, like tooth-flossing or taking your vitamins. People were encouraged to sit around and "rap" about their problems instead of actually solving them. (Note to today's kids: "rap" once referred to earnest, white-flair-clad white folk sitting around on a shag rug and talking about their "feelings." No rhyming was involved, at least not in any of the "rap sessions" I was roped into attending.) Rock just keeled over and died, but the stench of the corpse continued to linger for a few years. (Or so I thought then. Now the worst efforts of many a maligned Seventies-era "dinosaur" band sounds like Rachmaninoff next to the squeals and grunts emerging from groups such as Limp Bizkit and Matchbox 20.) Disco was king, men wore their shirts open to the waist - the better to reveal their wrinkly, I-am-too-old-for-this-and-fighting-it paunch, men wore scarves, and let's not forget hip-huggers, and yarn wall art, and macram�. No, let's.
Oh well, enough of the Seventies and my ancient traumas. I have had some thoughts which may shape themselves into a rant. One item on the rant-agenda is: kids! I'm sick of 'em! Well, not in real life - I have very little contact with actual children in the course of my usual day. But I'm getting tired of the bleating on both sides of the ideological fence on how We Must Protect The Children. You know: from sex (or lack of knowledge of it), from the effects of divorce (or from having to endure their parents' unhappy marriage), from violent video-games and movies (or from censorship), and so forth. No wonder kids' heads are so swelled these days: everything is being done in their name. God didn't get this much attention from the ancient Hebrews.
In lighter news: I recently figured out that in my apartment complex there are several one-bedrooms available. No matter how much crap I throw out or give away or stuff into my attic storage that I get here, I still need more space than the studio I have right now. I found out that for about one-fifth more rent I can get a place twice as big, with a real bedroom, more storage space, etc. Guess what I'm going to do as soon as my lease is up.